Mid-Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Garlic Moon<\/p>\n
Today is a bee day, with reversals and hive inspections.\u00a0 In reversals hive boxes get shuffled to keep the queen working in the bottom hive box and so the colony feels there is plenty of room, therefore no need to swarm.\u00a0 At last check the colonies all looked good, plenty of bees and brood.\u00a0 We’re still working out the kinks of our honey extraction process, trying to figure out ways to make it less painful for all:\u00a0 us and the bees.\u00a0 This year we’ll try an experiment, running the extractor in the garage with overhead water and an enclosed trailer for the frames awaiting extraction.\u00a0 Might work.<\/p>\n
The potatoes still need mounding due to the back spasms yesterday.\u00a0 If I can get finish that, I’ll call it a day.\u00a0 No Tai Chi tonight, at least I think not.\u00a0 We’ll see if the back limbers up after a day’s work or seizes up.<\/p>\n
Lori Sturdevant nailed the main problem with politics in our time.\u00a0 Communitarianism is no longer in fashion.\u00a0 Democracy demands a sense that we’re all in this together, all of us, the poor, the environment, business and government.\u00a0 The concept of social justice, so dependent on a robust notion of communitarianism, has disappeared from the political stage, reflecting in part the decline of the mainline protestant churches focus on the least of these.\u00a0 It reflects, in part, too, the old, more muscular liberalism of Hubert Humphrey:<\/p>\n
“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n It is not only, nor even most importantly, the moral test of government.\u00a0 It is the moral test of our nation.\u00a0 In this high stakes testing, we have slumped, our gpa falling, falling, driven lower and lower by greed that blocks out the other, by, as Lori Sturdevant also pointed out, a religious perspective focused on individual salvation, by a shriveled sense of community, one so depleted that community may extend no further than the edges of our own yards, our own apartments. <\/span><\/p>\n Returning to Heidegger, we are thrown into the world, landing in it with many existential givens.\u00a0 Those of us fortunate to have an upbringing that celebrated education, that helped us learn how to plan, how to work toward our goals, succeed.\u00a0 Those thrown into poverty, into communities for whom education equals selling out, for whom planning does not extend past today and whose work ethic never had a chance to develop, don’t.\u00a0 Of course there are exceptions, but note that there are exceptions in both sets of existential givens.\u00a0 There are, too, those thrown into disabled bodies or saddled with disabled minds.<\/span><\/p>\n To not note the grim effects of our thrownness on some and its salutary effects on others is to deny reality, to pretend the world is other than it is.\u00a0 This is the opposite of realism, it is denial.\u00a0 To note those effects and be committed to leveling them is not idealism, it is realism.\u00a0 In an increasingly competitive world we need the gifts and talents of all our citizens, not just a few, a lucky few with fortunate existential givens. <\/span><\/p>\n Let me try another tact.\u00a0 Love thy neighbor as thyself.\u00a0 We hold as self-evident that all (persons) are created equal.\u00a0 As long as one person is hungry, then we are all hungry. Mid-Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Garlic Moon Today is a bee day, with reversals and hive inspections.\u00a0 In reversals hive boxes get shuffled to keep the queen working in the bottom hive box and so the colony feels there is plenty of room, therefore no need to swarm.\u00a0 At last check the colonies all looked good, plenty of … Continue reading Communitarianism No Longer In Fashion<\/span>
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